Tuesday, August 11, 2009

30 nanoseconds of fame: Mint story on "A decade of the Blog"

Apparently, this year marks the completion of a decade since the first blog appeared. Mint's four-part series uses this factoid as a hook to take a detailed look at the Indian blogdom.

The series is by Ayeshea Perera and Krish Raghav, and the first part is out today. I am one of the people quoted in the story. I think I'm entitled to an extra 15 nanoseconds of fame this time because I appear in a story that also features The Compulsive Confessor ...

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Okay. Let me just park my sound-bites here.

Here I am bitching about bemoaning the dearth of academics -- espeically social scientists -- among Indian bloggers:

In the US blogosphere, you would find a lot of academics with solid expertise—the economic and law blogs there are fantastic—the commentary they are able to drum up after an important Supreme Court judgement, for example, is phenomenal,. [...] That is yet to catch up here. We have some good law blogs, but there is really no economics-oriented blog worth its salt here—run by an academic economist who can make some comment on the RBI policy or the finance ministry.”

And here's another where I hold forth on the growing diversity in India's blogdom:

“There is quite a bit of diversity now —simply because a lot more people have entered blogging,” says Abhinandan. “The diversity is reflected in what is being blogged about—for example politics—very leftist to very libertarian. A lot of blogs that talk about Dalit issues and so on—these voices were not that prominent in the early days.”

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The first part of the series is here. I'll add the links to the remaining three parts when they show up on the web.

6
Comments:

You have been quoted as saying, " We have some good law blogs, but there is really no economics-oriented blog worth its salt here—run by an academic economist who can make some comment on the RBI policy or the finance ministry.”

Abi, I have been following some Telugu blogs. Whatever the quality of the material, I think that they are contributing by just writing in Telugu. I feel that Telugu is in better shape now than five years ago in terms expressing somewhat complex technical stuff. Can you give us some idea of other regional language blogs, for example, Tamil.There is an interesting discussion in LanguageLog (which you might have already written about):http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1650

Ajay Shah has been writing about every aspect of indian (and to a good measure global) economic policies for over 4 years and regularly links to articles by Ila Patnaik, who has her own website full of articles that is very lucid and at the same time very educative.

http://ajayshahblog.blogspot.com/

Dr. Swarup,,

Badri seshadri you one stop solution for Tamil blogs and from there you will find lot of very good tamil bloggers.

I agree that Ajay Shah's blog is an excellent one on economic issues from an Indian perspective - really comparable to any of the best in the US, in terms of quality of original thinking and research and also regularity which keeps people hooked. For finance / financial economics (less so for some of the other aspects of macroeconomic policy making such as monetary or fiscal policy), Prof. J R Varma at IIMA also has an excellent blog at http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/~jrvarma/blog/